An interesting (to me, anyway) story caught my eye the other day. It was an announcement that digital agency LBi (number 2 in the New Media Age Top 100 digital agencies) will be merging with Big Mouth Media, a self-described 'Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing Specialist New Media Agency'.
I've worked at LBi in the past, and also at Sapient, the number 1 agency on that same list (and at several other top ten agencies, come to think of it), which is why it caught my eye.
But what really caught my eye was the price - £100m in an all-paper deal.
And the current market cap of Blinkx, the self-described 'world’s largest and most advanced video search engine'? Currently around £41m.
So an agency that certainly I had barely heard of before is worth £100m, while a company constantly trumpeted by its CEO as the Next Big Thing is languishing unloved and unregarded at a pitiful market cap, with shareholder discontent growing by the day, a total lack of any newsflow whatsoever, and no sign of any of this changing any time soon. Just completely moribund.
Why? Why does Chandratillake talk the talk but not walk the walk? Why has he said in the past that he's happy with analyst predictions of a profit in 2010 (it is 2010 now!) and now he's saying the company won't even break-even for another 18 months (despite what he said to Martin Sorrell in early 2008)? Why have shareholders been told nothing whatsoever about Zango, and the dozens of ex-Zango employees the company has since hired (perhaps as many as 50)? Why the total absence of anything approaching a B2C strategy of any kind?
In short, why is this company management so totally and utterly USELESS?
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